BlackBerry CEO John Chen recently offered some very good reasons for BlackBerry to keep making new phones, although he acknowledged at this point that he’s making them for a tiny audience. How tiny are we talking about? The latest numbers from Gartner show that BlackBerry is somehow still losing market share in the smartphone wars despite the fact that its overall share of the market has been well below 1% for the past year.
RELATED: Why the BlackBerry Storm was the single biggest disaster in smartphone history
Nonetheless, Gartner said BlackBerry phones accounted for 0.4% of all smartphone sales in the first quarter of 2015, down from a share of 0.6% in Q1 2014. But wait, it gets worse: BlackBerry’s overall device sales also sank in Q1 2015 to just 1.3 million units, down from 1.7 million in Q1 2014. This suggests that BlackBerry’s plan to drive up volume in emerging markets via its partnership with Foxconn has pretty much been a dud so far.
Elsewhere, Gartner found that Windows Phone’s market share also shrank from 2.7% in Q1 2014 to 2.5% in Q1 2015, although at least Windows Phone saw its total phone sales increase year-over-year from 7.6 million in Q1 2014 to 8.3 million in Q1 2015. Android and iOS, of course, remained the top two mobile platforms and delivered market shares of 78.9% and 17.9%, respectively.
